of colouring were attempted by the Peselli and the Pollajuoli.  Abandoning the conventional treatment of religious themes, the artists began to take delight in motives drawn from everyday experience.  It became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes, striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so that many pictures of this period, though worthless to the student of religious art, are interesting for their illustration of Florentine custom and character.  At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape and architecture, loading the background of their frescoes with pompous vistas of palaces and city towers, or subordinating their figures to fantastic scenery of wood and rock and seashore.  Many were naturalists, delighting, like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field flowers and living creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and curious.  Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects.  Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo Uccello.  Others, again, abandoned the old ground of Christian story for the tales of Greece and Rome; and not the least charming products of the time are antique motives treated with the freshness of romantic feeling.  We look in vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters:  that stage of thought has been traversed, and a new cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful, idyllic, corresponding to Boiardo’s episodes rather than to Dante’s vision, opens for the artist.  Instead of seeking to set forth vast subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like the Gaddi, or to invent architectonic compositions embracing the whole culture of their age, like the Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realising some special quality of beauty, expressing some fantastic motive, or solving some technical problem of peculiar difficulty.  They had, in fact, outgrown the childhood of their art; and while they had not yet attained to mastery, had abandoned the impossible task of making it the medium of universal expression.  In this way the manifold efforts of the workers in the first half of the fifteenth century prepared the ground for the great painters of the Golden Age.  It remained for Raphael and his contemporaries to achieve the final synthesis of art in masterpieces of consummate beauty.  But this they could not have done without the aid of those innumerable intermediate labourers, whose productions occupy in art the place of Bacon’s media axiomata in science.  Remembering this, we ought not to complain that the purpose of painting at this epoch was divided, or that its achievements were imperfect.  The whole intellectual conditions of the country were those of growth, experiment, preparation, and acquisition, rather than of full accomplishment.  What happened in the field of painting, was happening also in the field of scholarship; and we have good reason to be thankful that by the very nature of the arts, these tentative endeavours have a more enduring